I also dislike the growing conflation between video game preservation and video game access. Preservation means the video game museum has a copy of every Atari game ever made and visiting scholars can consult their library. It doesn’t mean you, Joe Schmo, have access to them, and you won’t. The games are perfectly preserved either way.
This reached its peak when i was browsing the web page for one of the Yuzu knockoffs (that got taken down by nintendo shortly thereafter) that had a tagline like “we care about video game preservation” written above screenshots from Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild. Brother, those games sold millions of copies, we are never, ever, in a million years, going to “lose” them.
We already have a word for you being able to access a video game in a way that that game’s original publisher did not intend: piracy.
Everyone wants to pretend they have some sort of moral or legal case as to why they can access those games in different ways and they don’t. But they have to justify this because they’re weak cowards that are afraid of being associated with piracy (which, for the record, i think piracy owns, lmao).
This went back to the Yuzu devs. Couldn’t have happened to a better band of clowns. They actively sabotaged and pissed on projects that made Switch piracy easier because they’re the ones that are doing it the right and legal way. So when the news broke, I was doing whippets over it.
Moral of the story, don’t be a coward, pirate games. And don’t try to pass it off as something else, you’ll only be hurting your own case.
It’s incredible that emulation devs are still hosting their shit in the US/five eyes countries. How many multi million dollar fines dished out by John Nintendo does it take for people to start hosting their shit in Russia and china? Russian forums have been going on for decades now with little budge. They would probably go out of their way to give you advice on how to further avoid the already lax authorities
I don’t know if it even is “piracy” though. If you go to a library and ask to see today’s newspaper or borrow that latest bestseller and to make a few copies with your phone or the library photocopiers they will just let you do it. Sure you could subscribe for way too much money to various online services and do this at home, but libraries do indeed let you have this kind of shit for free. Some libraries even let you borrow console games for free too.
But that’s all physical media. All the rules about online digital media were written during the neoliberal period so digital copies of things are all extremely restrictive and locked down. Doing what would be considered totally normal and mundane just a couple of decades ago is now suddenly a radical act of “piracy”.
Whatever petty rights you retain over physical media is only because publishers didn’t find a good way to take them away for now.
To use a very very stupid example (it’s late give me some slack) you can buy a tomato and eat it, but if you plant the seeds of the tomato, you might get blackbagged by monsanto or whoever, because you only got a licence to eat the tomato, not to plant it. And it doesn’t get more “physical” than shit you buy to eat. Digitalisation is coming for everything.
As for physical game libraries, I don’t think they are piracy, no. As for game emulation, it could be piracy because most games are encrypted on disk and only the publisher’s $300 machine is allowed to decrypt it without falling foul of the DMCA.
I think people should be making the moral and ethical case for game ownership (and game piracy). My point is more, I don’t want to need a bachelor’s in law or ethics to justify piracy because i think piracy in and of itself is value neutral.
Nowhere, you don’t own jack shit.
I also dislike the growing conflation between video game preservation and video game access. Preservation means the video game museum has a copy of every Atari game ever made and visiting scholars can consult their library. It doesn’t mean you, Joe Schmo, have access to them, and you won’t. The games are perfectly preserved either way.
This reached its peak when i was browsing the web page for one of the Yuzu knockoffs (that got taken down by nintendo shortly thereafter) that had a tagline like “we care about video game preservation” written above screenshots from Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild. Brother, those games sold millions of copies, we are never, ever, in a million years, going to “lose” them.
We already have a word for you being able to access a video game in a way that that game’s original publisher did not intend: piracy.
Everyone wants to pretend they have some sort of moral or legal case as to why they can access those games in different ways and they don’t. But they have to justify this because they’re weak cowards that are afraid of being associated with piracy (which, for the record, i think piracy owns, lmao).
This went back to the Yuzu devs. Couldn’t have happened to a better band of clowns. They actively sabotaged and pissed on projects that made Switch piracy easier because they’re the ones that are doing it the right and legal way. So when the news broke, I was doing whippets over it.
Moral of the story, don’t be a coward, pirate games. And don’t try to pass it off as something else, you’ll only be hurting your own case.
It’s incredible that emulation devs are still hosting their shit in the US/five eyes countries. How many multi million dollar fines dished out by John Nintendo does it take for people to start hosting their shit in Russia and china? Russian forums have been going on for decades now with little budge. They would probably go out of their way to give you advice on how to further avoid the already lax authorities
I don’t know if it even is “piracy” though. If you go to a library and ask to see today’s newspaper or borrow that latest bestseller and to make a few copies with your phone or the library photocopiers they will just let you do it. Sure you could subscribe for way too much money to various online services and do this at home, but libraries do indeed let you have this kind of shit for free. Some libraries even let you borrow console games for free too.
But that’s all physical media. All the rules about online digital media were written during the neoliberal period so digital copies of things are all extremely restrictive and locked down. Doing what would be considered totally normal and mundane just a couple of decades ago is now suddenly a radical act of “piracy”.
Whatever petty rights you retain over physical media is only because publishers didn’t find a good way to take them away for now.
To use a very very stupid example (it’s late give me some slack) you can buy a tomato and eat it, but if you plant the seeds of the tomato, you might get blackbagged by monsanto or whoever, because you only got a licence to eat the tomato, not to plant it. And it doesn’t get more “physical” than shit you buy to eat. Digitalisation is coming for everything.
As for physical game libraries, I don’t think they are piracy, no. As for game emulation, it could be piracy because most games are encrypted on disk and only the publisher’s $300 machine is allowed to decrypt it without falling foul of the DMCA.
I think people should be making the moral and ethical case for game ownership (and game piracy). My point is more, I don’t want to need a bachelor’s in law or ethics to justify piracy because i think piracy in and of itself is value neutral.